


The Untidy Lot

by newredshoes



Category: Cold Comfort Farm - All Media Types, The World's End (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Gen, Hollywood, Robots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:44:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newredshoes/pseuds/newredshoes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>American moviegoers are swooning for Seth Starkadder. But there's something unnerving about life on the Hollywood backlots. They're only after one thing: your blood. Your breath. Your life. Which is why Seth is ever so glad when Flora Poste drops in for a studio tour.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Untidy Lot

**Author's Note:**

  * For [innie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/innie/gifts).



Much as she desired the world to come to the higher common sense and embrace modern life, Flora Poste (modern enough to keep her maiden name) found some comfort in the constancy made available from some quarters of her acquaintance.

“How are you finding Los Angeles, Seth?” she shouted from the passenger seat. Seth drove his canary-colored roadster with an urgency he could never quite summon from Viper back at Cold Comfort. They weaved and sped down the highway, never letting any other cars within earshot. At last he turned to her, his brow knit, his very bankable eyes blazing and his shoulders hunched under his fine camelhair coat.

“They only want one thing,” he said, gripping the wheel. “Your blood. Your breath. Your heart out of your body.”

“Sounds smashing!” yelled Charles from the back seat, from beneath all their luggage. It was Charles who had suggested they pop over to California during their honeymoon year. Buenos Aires was a gas, and there was simply no believing Rio, but their ship was chartered go through the Canal anyway. If they just stayed on another leg, Flora knew Havana could wait. 

“We’re going there for family,” she told Charles as they watched the donkeys valiantly heave the locks open in Panama.

“Are you sure we’re not going because you still want to write a book?” he’d asked.

But no, it was for family that she frowned and smiled at the same time and said, “But of course, Seth, what did you think Hollywood would be like?”

“No, I en’t—that’s not what I mean.” He shook his head, which smelled rather more of hair oils than the yard muck of old. “You haven’t seen it yet. But you will, you mark my words. You see it in their eyes.”

“Goodness, you’re starting to sound like Aunt Ada.”

Quite unlike Aunt Ada Doom, Seth clamped down tight as an oyster. Flora didn’t mind. “Such a thrill to smell California at last!” she exclaimed. “It really does smell like oranges. Of course I’ve seen it before in pictures, and heard all about it for ages, but smell is hardly portable, which means it’s almost always quite real. Wouldn’t you agree, Seth?”

Seth gave her a look that even Flora couldn’t clearly interpret, which she took as a compliment to Mr. Neck’s acting coaches. Bemusing, really, that Seth Starkadder made it to Los Angeles ahead of her, but life is full of little plot twists that one must appreciate as they come; they’ve so much more savor when one doesn’t work so hard for them. 

What a difference fifteen months makes. Hollywood had been good to Seth—he’d even been cleared to use his real name in the pictures, which the American audiences seemed to find less grim than dreamy. Reuben had written Flora care of Mrs. Smiling in London that this was causing all sorts of excitement at the farm. Urk had stolen some old sheets and was cutting them up to sell by mail order, and Mrs. Beetle was already taking bookings for her little Starkadder jazz band. Flora congratulated them all for being so enterprising.

But none of it, not even the moving pictures themselves, could have prepared them for the sight of the studio gates as Seth pulled up in front of his place of employment. Young ladies swooned on the sidewalk. Spent flashbulbs littered the ground at photographers’ feet. It was all beautifully choreographed. Flora, however, twisted in her seat.

“What’s that?” She peered at the figure holding his ground at the edge of the sidewalk. “Is that Cousin Amos?”

“Don’t look at him,” Seth muttered.

The Ford van was nowhere in sight, but Amos was flanked by a number of lurid, hand-painted signs and banners announcing the various punishments the makers and enjoyers of talking pictures could expect in the Great Beyond.

Charles was very concerned. “Isn’t that your father?”

“‘Tis.”

“Well, have you gone and talked with him? Does he know you’re here?”

Seth sighed. “Oh, he knows.”

The guard tipped his hat. The roadster slid forward through the open gates. Cousin Amos couldn’t very well compete with Bantam Studios: sets and costumes and actors swanning all up and down and back and forth.

“I say!” Charles announced.

Seth did preen a bit at that. “Not bad, is it?” He remembered himself, though. “You’d better watch yourself. They eats you if you’re not careful.”

“Not if you don’t eat them first?”

But Seth didn’t rise to Flora’s gentle ribbing. He parked the roadster behind one of the hulking soundstages, in a spot marked with his name in a shiny new plaque. Some sort of attendant hurried up to the car. “Watch our things,” Seth said, and Charles straightened abruptly.

“You’ll just leave them here in the open?”

“No one’ll take ‘em.” Seth shrugged, and his camelhair shoulders rose and fell with a certain reckless insouciance. “Unless you want to stay behind for all them to find you.”

Charles, who knew how to fly airplanes and had no interest in looking underly reckless, climbed out of the roadster. “Where are you taking us?”

“Lot tour,” Seth said darkly. “They can’t know I know.”

Flora was hardly convinced there was very much of anything to know: everyone at the first lot, which was set up for a sort of Biblical epic with a young actress who was sure to be America’s new darling, couldn’t have been more charming. The grips and the caterers and the assistants fawned over Seth. The director even interrupted a take to introduce himself and let Flora shout through his megaphone.

“Very diverting!” she proclaimed on their way back into the sunshine.

Seth shook his head. “Watch ‘em more closely. You’ll see it.”

The next set was some sort of comedy of manners, which would surely rocket a fine young actor into superstardom when American audiences heard his real British accent. The studio had asked Seth to test for the part, until he’d opened his mouth and they realized that “English” can mean quite a lot of sounds that Americans aren’t expecting from their screen stars. But they were all quite fond of Seth, from the fawning scriptwriter to the cheeky makeup artists to the cigar-chewing gaffer.

(“What is a gaffer?” Flora asked, but all Seth knew was that he was the equally inexplicable best boy’s boss.)

“I think you’re being rather a bit paranoid,” said Charles, who was quite taken with the whole arrangement. “Everyone’s been nothing but lovely to us.”

“You don’t see it, do you?” Seth shook his head. “Should have thought you wouldn’t.”

Flora sighed now. “Seen what, Seth?”

“Your reflection,” he said, all huskiness. “At the back of their eyes.” At that, he pounded his fist into the heel of his hand. “I’ll show you, then. You’ll see what I mean.”

The third stage was some sort of Robin Hood romance depicting a crowded town square. Cousin Amos had found his way to the center of the massing extras, and shouted every so often about hellfire and burning while the camera rolled.

After the take was done, Flora pushed her way onto the set and called Cousin Amos by name. When he spotted her, he couldn’t quite decide whether to glower or grin, so he compromised, which had the mixed effect he originally intended.

“Come to hear again what’s awaiting the heathen sinners?” He waved at the other extras, who seemed content to mill around and try to adjust their costumes. “They’ll quiver if they listens, but it’s too late, too late for ‘em all.”

“Amos, I’m positively startled to see you here. How on earth did you get inside?”

Cousin Amos straightened his placards, which the producers hadn’t seen fit to make him remove, presumably for added medieval authenticity and color. “In Heaven, there’s only the way in through the front gate, but as with the fiery pits of Hell, here there lie many side doors that not even the righteous guard and that the devils open wide to lure ye with sweetmeats and jellies and pies.”

Much later, they discovered that Amos could be spotted in crowd scenes for at least twenty-two pictures, from a desert souk to a racetrack to a Russian royal court (wherein he’d interrupted the young Anastasia’s climactic monologue with a hymn about demons skinning, spitting and seasoning your flesh). He received two dollars and a buffet lunch for his time, which allowed him to keep himself in fresh acrylics and gasoline for his real mission.

“I’m sure there’s a less godless way for you to earn your keep,” said Flora. “Have you spoken to Seth at all about a little help?”

Amos narrowed his eyes. “I wouldn’t take that libertine’s sin-gotten gifts if I was dangled over the open flame by Satan himself.”

“I’m sure he could use your guidance now more than ever,” she said. “He seems to be very distressed lately.”

“Clear the set! Action in thirty!” called the assistant director.

“Them as won’t confront whom they truly obey will be slaves in Hell when the time is right!” Amos declared, shuffling back into place. Flora watched him for a moment, thinking it all over, until a smartly dressed young man beckoned her out of the camera’s sightlines.

“So you’re here from England, huh?” he whispered.

“Yes, from London,” she whispered back.

“Gosh, I’ve never been. We’ve been making this movie and I’d just love to see if it’s really like this over there.”

Flora glanced back at the peasants in the square. “We’ve come a little way since the Crusades, I hope.”

“Well, gee.” The young man laughed. “Everybody needs a little help getting their act together.”

For a split second, when the young fellow tripped so heavily and so completely, Flora was sure it must have been because he wasn’t looking where he was going. But Seth withdrew his foot and yanked Flora back just in time to witness perhaps the greatest pratfall of all time. The young man pitched forward, limbs flailing, and smashed all over the floor, leaking a horrid blue mess where he fell.

“D’you believe me now?” Seth hissed. All the rest of the crew turned as one with a great clanking noise and glared.

“That was very inconsiderate,” the director boomed through his megaphone.

“Witness ye now the wages of idleness!” Amos howled, and the whole set broke into chaos. Extras marched toward Seth and Flora, their eyes and open mouths blazing a cold blue light. The craft services men lifted Charles aloft, despite his many protests. The doors and entrances all slid shut in beautifully executed unison.

“Oh for heaven’s sake!” Flora cried, quite exasperated, and all movement within the sound stage halted. She turned to Seth. “Would you mind telling me exactly what you have against all this?”

Seth wriggled out of his camelhair coat, by which a surprisingly strong young powder girl gripped him. “You heard what Mr. Neck said when he came for me! Red meat, they want red meat in the talkies.” He grasped Flora by the shoulders, rather like LaVon Martin in the climactic bit of _She Wore Her Ribbons Black._ “Me! I’m just meat to them!”

“Oh Seth, do calm down and stop being such an essentialist.” Flora slipped out from under his paws and turns smartly toward the director and the wall of angry automatons. “Who’s in charge?”

Seth gaped. “You’re one of them!”

“Not in the slightest. I’d know who should address your concerns if I was a robot, wouldn’t I.” She whispered over her shoulder: “I’m helping you.”

The director tapped his megaphone on his knee. “I’m sure we can make Mr. Starkadder more comfortable right here.” His other hand crackled with blue light. Back in the crowd, Cousin Amos moaned and tried to shuffle out of sight.

Flora smiled. “That’s a lovely offer, but I’d prefer not to fuss around.”

The director sighed. “Very well.”

“What does that mean?” Charles asked, still aloft in craft services’ competent clutches. “Flora, what is going on?”

That was when the floor began to sink. 

“Look ye, sinners, the flaming maw of Hell itself!” Amos cried from above, having successfully pressed himself against a far wall.

Seth made a valiant leap for the edge, and even clung to it for a moment or two, but Flora called him down, and he wisely bowed to both her wisdom and that of many stunt masters before him, that it’s better to fall from a small height than a great one. The extras and the directors remained in place, glaring at Seth and Flora (and Charles, presumably), as the edges of the platform separated into concentric tiers from which they could loom. The sinking middle ground to a halt; the _thud_ echoed through what sounded like a much larger chamber.

Overhead, a number of speakers fizzled to life.

_-What is the purpose of this disruption?_

Flora lifted her eyes. A golden orb hovered above them.

“It seems my cousin Seth is having some workplace difficulties here,” she said, bright but firm. “You’re all making him very nervous. Is there any reason to believe you bear him some hostility?”

The Golden Orb would have clucked its tongue if it had one.

_-He’s profitable. But so messy._

Flora crossed her arms.

“You’ll never make me one of you!” Seth bellowed, shaking his fist. “I seen what you done to the others you don’t like!”

The Golden Orb shimmered irritably. _-Who says we don’t like you?_

Flora frowned. “What have you seen, Seth?”

He pointed at all the extras. “They were people once. These robots took ‘em and made ‘em into their own. Took their blood—their breath—their lifes!”

“How long has this been going on?” But Flora had directed her question to Seth, not the orb.

Seth shuffled, then held up his chin. “Long as I been here. Few months.”

 _-It’s not you we want,_ the Golden Orb said. _You remember what Mr. Neck told you. No more sissies! The American moviegoing public wants real people in its talkies._

Flora raised her eyebrows. “But not real people to make them?”

_-You’re inefficient. Petty. Misguided. But you want to be better. We’re here to help. We just tidy up. Make a few changes._

“While I sympathize, I can’t really endorse your methods,” said Flora. “Isn’t it better to help people discover their inner potential themselves?”

The Golden Orb shimmered, processing this.

_-Not really, no._

“We can rip off their arms, if need be,” Seth muttered behind her.

“Don’t be primitive!” To the Golden Orb, she said, “Nor should you be. Really, one would think that no one read _Emma_ anymore! One shouldn’t seek to control, just to guide gently when necessary, and most importantly to lead by example.”

_-We are the Studio. We will not be dictated by the likes of a human interloper!_

“Of course not.” Flora folded her hands and smiled. “Think of it more like a partnership. I’ll help you learn to be human around humans. You’ll be able to run your business smoothly, and you’ll have better relations with your employees.” She rose up on her toes. “Charles, dear, would you awfully mind staying in Los Angeles for a month or two?”

“Capital, darling!”

“Very good.” She smiled at the Golden Orb. “Would you kindly have your craft services gentlemen put my husband back on his feet?”

_-We haven’t agreed to anything!_

“How silly of me. Of course not. I’d very much like to talk it all over first. But first, I’m ever so curious: if you’re as powerful as all that, why the talkies?”

* * *

The town square set was empty, hours later, when the platform rose again—save for one witness, like Ishmael clinging to the coffin. Amos Starkadder, still locked inside the soundstage, watched Robert Poste’s child rise from the gloam with her gormless husband and his own godless son.

“Are ye living things or abominations unto the Lord?” he growled, brandishing a homemade scroll and a boom microphone.

“Quite alive, Father!” Seth called out, and with a few bounding steps, disarmed Amos with a hug.

Flora smiled. Charles made a habit of asking how she did it, and she always told him, but he never quite believed her. Her work was simple: indeed, it was all about noticing what was most simple about the world. People are so much more apt to chase down pursuits that stir their passions. Robots can’t be that different, not from what she’s seen. All Seth needed was to meet and understand someone who loved the movies as much as he did.

People—and robots, presumably—pride themselves on their work, of course. Not even a robot can prove itself more orderly than humans if robots have replaced all the humans with themselves. Anyone can overlook some details when making very big plans.

“That’s two solved in one evening,” said Charles, impressed.

It all smelled of oranges. Flora took his arm and kissed him on the cheek.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Innie -- I do hope you enjoy what's here. Thank you for such a great request, and happy Yuletide!
> 
> A smashing great thanks to 1 for chortling, 3 for yet another lynchpin and 2 for a truly heroic beta.


End file.
